1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a search system and, in particular to a search engine which can model a large data set, such as web pages on the Internet, and efficiently respond to natural language queries.
2. Description of Related Art
Internet search engines are continually being developed to provide succinct and useful responses to queries. The task is made extremely difficult by the wide variety of data that forms the pages of the web sites accessible on the Internet using the hypertext transfer protocol (http). The search engines allow free text queries of the web pages, and generally the engines use the words of the queries for direct comparison with words held in data sets that represent the web pages. The data sets may maintain simply keywords or meta data representative of the web pages, or a more extensive list of the words of a page, as for AltaVista™. Although the engines may omit common words, such as “the”, “a” and “of”, the direct word comparison with the words held in the representative data sets tends to give rise to a large and unmanageable number of responses, or “hits”, to a query. The accuracy and quality of the search results generated are problematic. The search engines also take no account of the actual meaning of the words in relation to the query, or the grammatical structure of the query. It therefore is desired to provide a search system or engine which alleviates these problems or at least provides a useful alternative.